I need your help. I’m working on a Scrum strategy for handling bugs and production support on a Scrum team. This is the first draft of the chart below. I already have a couple of changes I would like to make, so I’d appreciate it if anyone could provide feedback on the chart below. Just hit the “comment” button below or email me directly with your advice. Thanks!

The Scrum Guide doesn’t directly address how to incorporate production support and bugs into your Scrum implementation. As such, it is left up to the implementers to decide how to handle it. The strategy(chart) below is one I’ve developed as a result of coaching teams that are new to Scrum.

I hope you don’t need the chart. I’ll say it again. I hope you don’t need the chart below. I hope that you have so few bugs and productions support issues arise, that you don’t even really need to worry about classifying bugs or coming up with a technique to handle production support. But, for the teams that need some guidance on how to incorporate these issues into their Scrum implementation, see below for one way to approach it. I also feel compelled to say that if you find yourself needing this strategy/chart often, you probably have some serious root cause analysis and retrospecting to do on these occurrences.